ALONE
When he awoke it was full day and the sands beyond the tent opening lay
white and blazing in the sunlight down to the blue, lazy sea.
He remembered everything at once. It would almost have seemed that his
mind behind the veil of sleep had been reasoning the matter out, for he
had awakened saying to himself out loud, and as if he were continuing
a conversation, “Yes—and what is more, I saved his life.” He crawled
from the tent and stood erect beneath the palms. The morning, warm,
sweet, and sunlit, lay around him; the sapphire sky and flashing sea;
snow-white gulls and snow-white sands. A hot, gentle wind was stirring
the palm fronds. He collected some dry brushwood for the fire, lit it,
and piled on some wood from the wreck. When it was alight, flickering
a hundred red tongues at the sun and staining the blue air with smoke,
Gaspard was brought to his first pause. Of what use was the fire? He
was no good as a cook. Yves had been the cook; he had cooked crabs,
tinned meat, and what-not, using an old tin for a billy; he was born
for that sort of work and could do anything practical he turned his
hand to.
Yves had always done the cooking whilst Gaspard had looked on. This
fact struck Gaspard for the first time now. It was as though the dead
Yves was still proclaiming his superiority. Yves had salved most of
the stores, Yves had hunted for dead brushwood, Yves had found crabs,
Yves had found the spring of water, Yves had found the boat sail, Yves
had built the tent, Yves had found the ship of coral in the lagoon,
Yves had found the gold. Yves had done everything since their landing,
and he, Gaspard, had done nothing but smoke and dream.
Far from being a waster, he had, still, left everything to the big
blond man so full of energy and resource and the joy of life; the
southern laziness had held possession of him. All the same, Yves had
proved himself the better man and was proving the fact now, voiceless
and dead amidst the bushes as he was.
Gaspard kicked the fire to pieces and flung sand on the embers; then he
breakfasted on some ship’s biscuit and some tinned meat, lit his pipe
and strolled down to the sea-edge.
It was eight o’clock and the gasping warm wind came in over the morning
sea, the lazy, deep blue sea, so infinite, so beautiful, so desolate.
He stood, and, shading his eyes, he swept the horizon—not a trace of
sail or smoke could he see. The sky, of a burning emerald just above
the sea-line, swept up into the burning blue, and from sea and sky,
like the breath from a great blue mouth, came the warm wind. It felt
like a woman’s hot fingers playing with his hair, like a woman’s warm
arm cast round his neck.
From the southeast with the wind, now loud, now low, came the crying of
the gulls. Though he had heard them since awakening, he had not noticed
them till now; he turned his eyes to where they were wheeling and
flying spirit-white in the blue.
It was at this moment that Loneliness seized his heart. The fact of his
utter isolation had not stood before him full square till just now.
The gulls were explaining it to him.
“You are alone!—alone!—alone! Hi!—Hi!—Hi!—you there on the sands
alone!—alone!—alone!—we have nothing to do with you—we are nothing
to you—alone there on the sands—all day long and night and day, and
night and day, who will you speak to—what will you do? You there on
the sands alone!—alone!—alone!”
He drew his sleeve across his brow to wipe away the sweat that had
suddenly started tingling through his skin; then he cast his eyes again
over the sailless blue of the sea and, turning, came back to the tent.
When he reached it the terror left him, fell from him suddenly like a
dropped cloak. He cursed himself for his stupidity and, though his pipe
was not half exhausted, he tapped the tobacco out, re-filled and lit
it. It was something to do. Then, to drive the thought of Yves away, he
fell to imagining what sort of a ship would take him off the island,
and then he stretched his hand into the tent and pulled out the belt
and pouch of money. On the brass buckle of the belt, all green with
verdigris, there was something scratched. He cleaned the brass with
sand—it was something to do—and made out what seemed the initials
“S. S.” He pondered on these for a while and then, opening the pouch,
he turned the contents on to the sand.
Though he knew the number of coins, he counted them again and again—it
was something to do. Then he began to spend them in fancy, the
remembrance of the tragedy of yesterday always standing like a ghost
behind his thoughts and trying to obtrude itself.
This occupation lasted him an hour, and he was brought back from it
suddenly by a tug at his heart. It was still morning; the awful day
had scarcely progressed; the mantle of Loneliness had fallen on him
again; the gulls were still crying, calling, wheeling, rising, falling,
fishing mechanically and seeming part of a tireless mechanism fretting
the speechless blue of the sky.
He put the coins back in the pouch and flung belt and pouch into the
tent; then he rose to his feet and made towards the bushes.
On the sand still lay a mark as though a heavy sack had been dragged
along it towards the bushes.
He avoided the pointing of the sinister path and struck across the
islet, crushing the brushwood under foot. He had no object other than
to get away from the place where he was, to keep in motion—to be doing
something. The heat lay heavy over the bay cedars, the air was shaking
blanket-fashion under the fiery rays of the sun, the bushes were dense,
yet in a trice it seemed to him he had reached the northern beach. The
islet seemed to have led him across it to explain its smallness, and
as he stepped on to the beach a new sensation caught him in its grip.
The sensation of being ringed in, enclosed in a small circle from which
there is no escape.
Yet there were no bars, and around him on every hand stretched infinity.
He came along the reef forming the edge of the lagoon; the tide was
beginning to flood and the foretop of the ship was standing stark and
dry from the water; the ship herself was clearly to be seen, in this
light even more clearly than in the sunset glow. But the picture was
far less beautiful.
Grey and dead she seemed, lying there in the diamond-clear emerald of
the water, but the lagoon this morning was gay with fish, parrot-fish,
gropers, flights of coloured arrows, sapphire, ruby and emerald-tinted
ghosts.
The swell of the incoming tide came slobbering over the reef; shutting
one’s eyes one might have fancied a giant shuddering and catching his
breath and sobbing to himself.
Gaspard stood for a long time watching the moving life of the lagoon,
absorbed, as a child might be before the contents of an aquarium.
He had forgotten Loneliness for a moment, but she had not forgotten
him. As he stood with his eyes fixed on a large fish, sapphire and
mist-grey, that had developed like a spirit and was now hanging
motionless with moving gills above the ship, casting a vague shadow
upon the coral-crusted deck; as he stood watching it, the breeze
strengthened, stirring his hair, and on the breeze a voice hailed him,
far away and weary.
“Hi! Hi! Hi!—you there on the reef. Hi! Hi! Hi!—you there
alone!—alone!—alone!—see how the wind takes us, wheeling, fishing,
forever—alone—alone—alone.”
He turned his face to where, across the islet, far away in the blue,
the gulls’ white wings were winking and beckoning to him; their voices,
thinned by distance, had a desolation rendered even more desolate by
the gorgeour of the burning blue sky, the triumphant sunlight, the
licking of the warm weak wind.
There is no desolation so terrible as the desolation that lies
in summer warmth and blue skies. Here life ought to have been
superabundant, but here there was no life or moving thing save the wind
and the gulls and the waves.
“God!” said the Moco. He thrust his clenched fist in his pocket and,
turning from the lagoon, made his way along the rocks to the shore.
He returned to the south of the islet, not through the bushes, but
along the eastern sea-edge where the reefs were like rows of teeth and
the rock edges like razors. Here it was that most of the wreckage of
the _Rhone_ had come ashore, and here there was still wreckage enough,
in all truth. Here was something to do.
In a moment he was up to his knees in water. The _Rhone_, when the
explosion of the boilers rent her asunder, had cast wreckage enough
upon the water, but even still, as she lay beneath the surface, sinking
more and more completely to ruin, things were breaking loose from her
and rising as bubbles rise from a submerged body, and drifting ashore
with the tide. Hencoops, boxes, spars, barrels, were pounding about in
the surf. Heavy spars were here, all chawn and frayed by the reefs; the
coral teeth had left their marks on everything; there was nothing worth
salving, yet Gaspard worked like a dock labourer, hauling upon spars,
heaving at barrels, forgetting Loneliness in the exertion of manual
labour.
But she was there, and her voice forever speaking, subtle, like a music
interpenetrating all things from the sound of the wave to the silence
of the sky, made itself heard again.
As the power of friction brings a machine to a pause, so did this
voice, which was a part of the sunlight, a part of the silence, a part
of the blueness of sea and sky, bring Gaspard to a stand.
He wiped his brow and looked at the heap of things he had collected.
He remembered how Yves had laboured at the same job, and now, for the
first time since the tragedy, as he stood looking at the heap of spars
and wreckwood, a feeling of pity came to his heart for the man lying
there dead amidst the bay-cedar bushes.
The outburst of grief to which he had given way on the evening before
was, to speak truth, an outpouring of his southern nature; anger
suddenly checked and flung back by Death, inverted and bursting forth
furiously at the sight of the irreparable result of his anger.
But this feeling of pity for Yves came from the depths of his soul, for
it was born of pity for himself.
It was fatal for this feeling to enter his heart just now, for the
heart, softening towards the dead, opened the door for superstition to
enter.
He thought of the tent over there beneath the palms and how pleasant it
would be if, on his return, he were to find Yves sitting by the tent.
Then, with a chill of horror, came the idea—how awful it would be if
on his return he were to find Yves sitting by the tent! His imaginative
mind played with this idea for a moment and then cast it hurriedly
away. He laughed out loud to reassure himself, and the steady wash of
the sea made answer and the distant gulls. Then, leaving the salvage
bleaching in the burning sunlight, he came towards the southern beach.
No; there was nobody by the tent, but the wind was playing with a
loose corner of the sail-cloth, flapping it about. The tent seemed
beckoning to him as he came towards it across the white, blazing
sands. Everything—every sound, every gesture of animate or inanimate
nature, was beginning to have a deep and extraordinary significance
for Gaspard. The silence, the sunlight, and the blueness had first
conspired to shew him his loneliness; the gulls had insisted on it,
gloated over it, explained it; but now, since over there by the
wreckwood the pity for Yves and his fate had entered into his heart,
the gulls, the silence, the sunlight, and the blueness were speaking
a language less assured. “Are you alone? Hi! you there on the sands,
what’s that beckoning to you? Hi! Hi! The wind flaps the tent? Ha! ha!
Hi!”—and then silence for a moment, and then, weak, weary, querulous,
from the circling white spirits away there in the smoky blue of
midday—“Yves—Yves—Yves.”
The very poetry of Loneliness, Distance, Blueness, Regret—fatal regret.
Gaspard fastened up the flap, and the wind, as if vexed at being robbed
of its plaything, shook the palm fronds, and then some of the finest
of the sand on the beach gathered itself up into a little sand devil
and danced away on the wind. An unseen hand seemed moving everywhere
fitfully, now here, now there, touching the sand, touching the trees,
touching the bay-cedar bushes. Gaspard, as he lay with his head in the
shade of the tent resting after his exertion, listened to the faint
patter of the palm fronds and the whisper of the sand; sometimes the
sail-cloth of the tent would lift a bit to the wind.
It was only the wind, yet it moved like a living thing. Sometimes he
imagined a hand lifting the tent-cloth back and a voice saying, “Hullo!
what are you doing here?” He imagined Yves as the possessor of the
voice, and he drove the imagination from his mind.
Never for a moment did he feel fear of the body lying away there amidst
the bushes; not for the worth of the _Rhone_ would he have gone through
the bushes to look at it and see how it was faring at the hands of
corruption, yet he felt no fear of it; on the contrary, it was the
thing he dwelt on when he wished to allay fear. For fear, faint and
indefinable, was taking hold upon him now. He had no compunction about
the part he had played in the death of Yves. The thing was an accident,
so he told himself; all the same, men who die suddenly and violently
have a habit of haunting the place where they die.
You can run from a haunted house, but you cannot run from a haunted
island. This dread of no escape was what formed the true basis of his
fear, a thing on which to build terrible and fantastic edifices. He
lit a pipe and, smoking it, he fell asleep, awakening in an hour or so
refreshed and fearless. Sleep seemed to have wiped away Loneliness,
superstition, and all their attendant evils. He felt hungry, and
getting some tinned meat and biscuit from the store of provisions which
lay close to the trees he dined after a fashion, and then lit a pipe.
It was now half-past three, the gulls had ceased crying and afternoon
lay on the island like a hot, heavy hand. So still seemed everything
that one might have fancied the islet wrapped in idyllic peace; but it
was the peace that broods over fermentation. The air over the sands was
shaking in waves and a faint hum of insect life came from the bushes. A
torrid and tremendous pyramid of light stood upon nature, crushing her
to silence yet unable to stifle her faint fret and murmur.
At four o’clock Gaspard was standing at the end of the little pier of
coral reef just at the place where he had been standing yesterday, when
Yves’ voice had called him to see the treasure. There were no fish
visible in the water to-day, nothing floated there but an occasional
scrap of seaweed. The clear water, bright as a diamond and green as an
emerald, held the gaze with the fascination that lies in a globe of
crystal. Out here at the end of the projecting spur of reef, with the
sea on either side, one felt as though one were standing on the deck of
a boat.
It was pleasant out here with the sea coming in gently around the
rocks, leaving scarcely a trace of foam, scarcely a trace of sound;
the islet was singing to the little waves, but the reef only gurgled,
slobbered slightly when a higher ridge of swell lapped the more exposed
portions, and sighed as the water sinking exposed the weeds, the
clinging shells, and the coralline growths.
Gaspard, standing, looking into the green depths, mesmerized by their
crystal clearness and thinking of nothing, was suddenly brought to
consciousness by the feeling that someone was standing close behind
him. He wheeled round. Nothing. The reef, the islet, sea and sky were
destitute of life, yet distinctly he had felt as though someone were
standing behind him, almost in touch with him, almost breathing upon
his neck; and he felt that if he had turned more sharply he would have
caught sight of the viewless one; and the reef, the islet, sea and sky,
had for a moment a simpering look, as though they had succeeded in the
trick of snatching the Unseen One away before he could be glimpsed.
The absurdity of this idea destroyed it almost as soon as it was born.
He shook the sensation off with a little shiver and, casting his eyes
over the sea-line again as if in search for a ship, he began to walk
along the reef back to the shore.
He was stepping from the reef on to the sand, when upon the sand he saw
something that brought his breathing to a stop. The imprint of a naked
foot.
It was a foot-mark left by Yves, and there was nothing supernatural
about it at all; it had been left on the previous day, and it was still
sharp and clear, for a ledge of the reef had protected it from the wind
and the blowing sand; but to Gaspard it was more terrible than the
naked face of Death.
He walked away from the terrible thing with his hand clutching at his
heart, his eyes cast from side to side, not daring to look back. He did
not know where he was going, but his feet led him to the palm clump.
Here he sat down with his back to a tree bole. The terror was behind
him and the tree seemed to fend it off. The tree was a living thing;
all at once it had stepped out of the semi-inanimate world where trees
dwell and flowers, and had become a living personality. In his supreme
terror he could have turned and embraced it, but he was afraid for a
moment to move from his position, just as a man is afraid to move who,
attacked by enemies, has his back to a wall.
Such terror does not last in its entirety for more than a brief space
of time. Reason came to his assistance. He remembered that Yves had
been by the reef end on the day before. The foot-mark was a real thing.
No ghost could have left it.
He was telling himself this when,
“Hi! Hi! Hi!”
Loud, shrill, heart-snatching came a hail right from behind him. It was
the voice of Yves, and springing to his feet with a scream, Gaspard,
clinging to the tree-bole, looked.
A great black man-o’-war bird with bright eyes and coral-red beak was
passing over the islet and hailing it as it passed.
Tremendous, definite, and strong against the blue, yet more soundless
in flight than an arrow, it passed overhead without a motion of the
wings.
As it passed it hailed the island once again, and once again from far
out at sea, motionless, but fast dwindling till it became a faint speck
and was lost in the blue to southward.
Gaspard, breathing freely again, watched the great bird losing itself
in nothingness, lifting veil after veil of sky, and horizon after
horizon of sea, bound for some port of call in the Windwards or beyond.
The shock had been better than medicine to him, shewing him his own
superstition and the stupidity of his alarm. The island seemed suddenly
freed from the haunting presence; he began to doubt himself. If a bird
could make a fool of him like that, he must be a fool indeed.
A year seemed to have passed since sunrise and the sun was now dropping
to the sea, bringing to its end that vast blue day so filled with
loneliness and the terrors of the unknown.